Weight Loss is Hard and Poorly Understood

We've gone through various diets in the family of "low-carb high-fat" (LCHF) diets through the last year, and for me they've all been successful up to a point, that point being around 265 pounds. Now, that's not a bad thing -- that's close to 40 pounds lost in a year, and that really does make a difference even when you start at 300+. On the other hand, the plateau is annoying, doubly so because there are so many anecdotal reports of people losing 60-100 pounds on an LCHF diet.

The thing is, there are about a million different approaches to diet, high to low fat, carnivorous to vegan, and all of them can point to people who have lost much more weight in a year than I have.

I think we are sort of forced into a new hypothesis and it's one I can't test on my own 13 Weeks program. That hypothesis is that there are several sub-populations of people who have different causes for their obesity, and so several differing types of diet that lead to significant weight loss depending on which of the sub-populations you're in.

Diet Tracking is Helpful But Can Be Confusing

I've kept careful food diaries and tracked my weight and blood sugar very rigorously through most of this year. Here are some observations:

The food diary certainly helps; it literally helps "watch what you eat." On the other hand, the relationship between what you eat and what happens to your weight is a lot less simple than it appears, because we are complicated organisms. The whole notion of calorie counting, I think, is flawed, not because the thermodynamics aren't in some sense true -- every erg you produce has to come from an erg you've consumed -- but because the way we estimate food calories and how they're used is not that great an estimate. We don't consume calories by burning the food in pure oxygen in a calorimeter bomb, and we don't use them by running a steam engine with the results.

Tracking your weight day to day is psychologically and emotionally risky, especially if you're on a "sensible balanced diet" leading to a weight loss of a pound a week, or plateaued in some other diet -- which can look a whole helluva lot like that sensible diet. In fact, I suspect that tracking your weight every week is a little chancy, especially if your weight loss is slow.Why? Because our normal variation in weight is a good bit larger than the amount of weight you lose in a relatively short period. Think about it -- 1 pound a week is 0.15 pounds a day. Which is a little over the weight of 4 Tablespoons of water. A pound a week is 2 cups, a pint, of water. A weight loss of a pound a week can be hidden by drinking a glass of water at the wrong time.

Quantitatively, over the last year the variance in my weight day to day has been ± 5 pounds, and I know that salty popcorn or eating some wheat can spike my weight 6 pounds overnight. Those weight gains and losses aren't meaningful, but if you've been on a strict diet for a while, the tiniest slip can translate to the appearance that you've completely blown it.